Web merchants sell items such as products, services, and data via the World Wide Web (“the Web”). Because most items sold by a web merchant result in a profit, measured by the amount by which the item's price exceeds its cost, web merchants have a strong incentive to increase the rate at which they sell items.
It is common for web merchants to design their web sites to include content that helps to draw interest to the web sites and to particular items in order to increase the number of customers that may buy these items. As an example, some web merchants include a bestseller list on their web sites.
A bestseller list is a list of items sold by the web merchant in the largest numbers during a preceding period of time. For example, a web merchant that sells books may display a list of the 100 books that sold the most copies over the preceding 24 hours. This list of books is typically sorted such that the book that sold the most copies is listed first, the book that sold the second-most number of copies is listed second, etc. Each book may also be accompanied by a value called “sales rank,” where a sales rank of 1 accompanies the book that sold the most copies, a sales rank of 2 accompanies the book that sold the second-most number of copies, etc.
While bestseller lists can draw customer interest to books that are selling the largest numbers of copies, and thus have achieved the most substantial overall popularity, they also leave something to be desired. For example, because bestseller lists may be slow to change, they fail to reward customers that return to view them frequently, such as a number of times in a single day. This slow change rate also has the result of concentrating the promotional benefits on a few items, rather than distributing those benefits over a larger number of items. Additionally, bestseller lists reflect high-popularity items that have “made it,” rather than those whose popularity is growing, and are “up and comers.”
Accordingly, a feature on a merchant web site that overcame some or all of the aforementioned shortcomings of bestseller lists would have significant utility.